IFComp News: A nod to those who waited

Several reviewers of 2014’s competition made the observation that this year seemed remarkably free of unfinished, untested, broken, prankish, or similarly inappropriate entries. Even the entries they’d end up giving lower scores to possessed admirable levels of experimentation or ambition, though perhaps not coming together as well as the higher-rated games.

I choose to connect this with the fact that I made a conscious effort to advise would-be authors to not submit unfinished work, emphasizing this message on the authorship guidelines, and stating it again in the email to authors just prior to the entry deadline. I have reason to believe that past years would often see a number of entries by authors who found the creative process taking more time than they’d accounted for — and, on the cusp of the deadline, they would just submit whatever they had. Inevitably, these entries would not fare well against the more complete and polished work. Furthermore, since competition rules forbid the entry of any previously released work — even if the entry improves on an older release — this represented wasted potential, preventing a future IFComp of seeing more developed versions of these games.

Most authors who submitted intents to enter this year did end up choosing to withhold an actual entry. I saw circumstantial evidence on social media suggesting that many directly took my advice to hold onto their unfinished game, and continue to work on it for a future competition, rather than rush it unready into the crucible of the IFComp.

To all those who took this route, I say: thank you. It can be a hard decision to choose to wait it out, but I think you made the right choice, both for the competition and for your own work. And I also say: the 2015 competition will start accepting intents seven months from now. I sincerely hope to see what you have for us then!

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